Exile is more than a crossing of borders; JMU
scholars say it is a journey to one's self

'You shall leave behind all that you love

most dearly, and this is the arrow

that the bow of exile shoots first.

You shall find out how bitter

someone else's bread tastes,

and how hard is the way

up and down another's stairs.'

-- Dante, Paradise (Canto XVII, 55-60)

In the closing years of the 13th century,
Florentine public life is a persistent danger zone for all who dare
press their fortunes in it. The vicissitudes of
politics become not more certain, but all the more treacherous when
the Ghibelline party finally succumbs to the power of the
Guelphs. Writ large on European life is the pope's campaign
to consolidate his control over temporal as well as spiritual
matters, as the sniping Guelphs take up sides as Blacks and Whites
inside the walled city-state.

Into this peril steps the novice politician Dante
Alighieri, who speaks and votes in various councils of the
republic. Well-educated in philosophy and theology and with a
collection of verse already published, Dante has not yet achieved
literary greatness. Instead, says Giuliana Fazzion, he stumbles
"against a host of unpredictable snares.

"Florence was such a tangle of public and private
passions," the foreign language and literature professor explains.
When Boniface prevails in 1300, and Dante's cohort falls out of
favor, Dante himself is accused of misdeeds. Against the pope's
backers, Dante cannot win. In 1302, banished from his beloved
Florence, Dante

begins life as "a
fugitive poet and beggar," Fazzion says. He spends the rest of his
life roaming the courts of Italy, never to return.

The 700th anniversary of Dante's exile might appear
a rather esoteric occasion around which to fashion even an academic
conclave. Except, as organizer Fazzion and more than 100 JMU and
visiting scholars revealed in presentation after presentation last
October, the experience of exile is a harsh reality that has
repeated itself throughout history and is a theme that continues to
resonate in the arts.

Emily Bronte, François René de
Chateaubriand, Joseph Eichendorff, Joseph Conrad, Paula Marshall
and Alice Walker all deal with exile motifs, whether explicit or
implicit, internal or external. Verdi and Donizetti romanticize it
in their opera masterpieces. Art can illuminate the reality of
exile and cross its barriers, says dance professor Cynthia
Thompson, whose students' interviews of immigrants to the
Shenandoah Valley served as the foundation for a major performance
last spring.

Artists as diverse as the classical poet Ovid and
the great African-American contralto Marian Anderson, separated by
millennia, have endured various forms of exile in their own lives
-- either forced, like that of Dante, or self-imposed, like those
who fled persecution. So too have the world's prominent
intellectuals. For instance, both Henry Kissinger, who shaped U.S.
foreign policy on Wilsonian ideals, and Hannah Arendt, who
elucidated European totalitarianism, first escaped the Nazis.

Multimedia artist Charlotte Salomon did not. Her epic autobiographical play, Life?or Theater?, mixes painting, prose,
playwriting and song, and was strongly influenced by feelings of
exile and death as the Nazi noose tightened around Europe, says
English professor Susan Facknitz.

Exile in Russia meant life in Siberia or the
Caucasus, restricted to one's own estate or under house arrest.
"Russian intellectuals have been sent into exile throughout
history," says history professor Mary Louise Loe. From the
18th-century Aleksandr Radishchev, known as the first Russian
intellectual, to Andrei Sakharov, father of the Russian bomb and
last official Soviet dissident, Russian history boasts a veritable
who's who of exiles: Bakunin, Ballanchine, Baryshnikov, Chagall,
Dostoevski, Gorky, Kandinksy, Nureyev, Prokofiev, Pushkin,
Rostropovich, Solzhenitsyn, Trotsky and even Lenin.

The reasons for exile are universal, Loe says. "It
was to silence them, to isolate them, to cut them off from society,
to put them in a box somewhere and never hear from them again."
Often the outcome was the opposite. "As a result, so many people
did so much more. I can't think of many cases where people were
sent off and just forgotten about. They used that time to be
completely productive in terms of developing their ideas."

As Loe and Fazzion point out, the positive effects
of exile can overshadow the negative. While despair drove Dante to
contemplate suicide, it was also exile that inspired him to write
the Divine Comedy. "… no work of
the past is more of a classic than Dante's Divine Comedy," Fazzion
explains. "A classic is a text that has permanent significance, that carries a permanent message for
all generations. … a classic is a
text that never belongs to the past but always to the present, a
contemporary text, a text in which human beings -- precisely
because they are human beings -- keep rediscovering themselves.

"Exile turned out to be for Dante a blessing in
disguise," Fazzion says. "You cannot understand Dante without
understanding the bleak clarity exile brought to his vision.
… Exiled, never to return, his life became a mythical quest
for the divine. … Exile was a great creative force."

English professor Suzanne Bost, who finds "exile
from one's self at home" in the writings of Chicana poet Gloria
Anzaldúa, says, "Exile involves pain and rupture, but it
produces what we're talking about."

Implied in exile, says JMU Semester in Florence
professor Alessandro Gentili, is a notion of traveling.
Etymologically, he explains, the word derives from "ex" (away) and
"ilios" (soil) and means "away from the homeland." The destination
of Dante's journey, however, is not a geographic location, but
one's self, Gentili says. Dante "is the salmon source of exile, the
primary source of political exile. … Without the painful and
tormenting experience of exile, Dante would miss the return to
self."

For more recent exiles, displacement would begin a
journey of unprecedented intellectual achievement in their new
countries. Among them, says JMU physics professor Bill Ingham, was Nobel Prize-winning
physicist Enrico Fermi, who fled Mussolini's fascist dictatorship.
He directed the building of uranium and graphite piles in Chicago
as part of the U.S. wartime effort to build a nuclear bomb at Los
Alamos. Also at Los Alamos for a short time were the controversial
Edward Teller, European immigrant and father of the hydrogen bomb,
and the future Nobel Prize-winning physicist Hans Bethe, head of
the theoretical division at Los Alamos. These three and others
helped the United States attain and maintain scientific, military
and political dominance in the 20th century.

"The biology influx was fewer and younger," says
biology professor Ivor Knight, but the discovery of the structure
of DNA in 1953 "owes its existence to those young exiles whomade
their way from Central Europe in the 1930s and made their
reputations in the United States."

Exile is anything but positive for a depressingly
great number of the world's inhabitants, says sociology and
anthropology professor Nikitah Okembe-Ra Imani. He describes exile
as a social construct endured by "the other" and created by a power
structure that divides people into "us and them," "positive and
negative," "present and absent."

Schoolchildren who fall outside the mainstream are
often the ones who find themselves classified as them, negative or
absent. "If their behavior doesn't match the school's idea [of
acceptability]," says education professor Doris Martin, "these are the children who share Dante's
hell."

For statistics professor Hassan Hamdan, who grew up
in Jenin near the Palestinian refugee camp, exile was palpable. In
the 54 years since the founding of Israel, Palestinians have raised
children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren in the camp's now
permanent housing and suffer poverty, ill health, discrimination
and violence.

"Exile can be a legal condition," says keynote
speaker John A. Doyle, a poet and immigration lawyer who has helped
countless victims of persecution seek asylum in the United States.
"Modern states have become good at harassing people into leaving,"
he says. Even seeking asylum can be a form of exile for someone who
must recount humiliating details of torture in a bureaucratic
procedure. "The refugee needs a human connection to re-establish
his significance," he says.

"Most exiles are not great scholars or writers like
Dante," Doyle says. "They are not activists or in a fringe group;
they're not out to change the world. They're everyday people.
… Maybe if we read the poets," he concludes, "we'll increase
our sense of humanity and hope for people who are not scholars and
poets."